The present invention relates to a method of determining patterns or shapes of knitted segments for efficiency knitting a knit product, e.g. a sweater or cardigan, which is also known as an integral or whole garment, with the use of a knitting machine which performs a knitting action for yielding rows of major stitches, and more particularly, a method of determining a sleeve and a body pattern which are joined in a good fit.
In common, a body portion and a sleeve or other portion of a knit fabric are joined by sewing at the joining step succeeding the knitting step. This takes a considerable length of time in the production. Also, a resulting knitted product composed of the segment portions joined by sewing will exhibit less stretchability and if worse, may be torn apart along a joined seam in use.
For overcoming the foregoing drawback, modified methods have been introduced which incorporate an integral or whole garment knitting technique. One such method is proposed by the same applicant as of this specification, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication 2-229248(1990), in which each tubular sleeve portion is joined with a body portion during knitting action with the use of a flat knitting machine which has two pair of front and rear needle beds arranged in an upper position and a lower position respectively. front and rear sides respectively.
Since the set-in end of each sleeve portion is joined to the armhole of the body portion, the two seams have to be equal to each other in the number of stitches. The disadvantage of the method is that the two seams can be joined with difficulty while their armhole circumferential lengths only are measured to match. In action, optimum patterns or shapes of the sleeve and body portions for desired joining will be given through a series of experiments, which will result in the loss of time.
Hence, the method of knitting sleeve and body patterns of which shapes are determined after a number of trials is low in the productive efficiency and when modification is wanted in the shape, it has to use a troublesome cut-and-try technique.
In particular, if such sleeve and body patterns are joined while their length measurements are translated to stitches, it will be necessary, due to difference in the number of courses, to displace some stitches and/or adjust the number of lines. Therefore, an improved method of determining patterns for optimum joining has been wanted.